>>22That would lead to lower prices for the consumer due to competition, and technology would propagate faster to the point where it can benefit the common man.
No it would not. Not everyone can actually do important research or even program very well. And those that can need to make a career out of it, meaning there has to be some economic incentive. The stupid masses aren't going to do that in their spare time.
Seriously, this is perhaps the dumbest thing in your post. The entirety of human progress has been driven by ever increasing specialization.
Or perhaps you just don't understand economics. If it were possible for some venture capitalist to just steal the research of some competitor, they would. They they are at an advantage, because they get to reap the reward without having to have paid for research and development.
That's how things are already. The information which becomes public through the process of applying for a software patent is less than can be obtained by looking at the machine code.
That's true, but software patents don't stop looking at machine code. You can go get a patented part off a car and take it apart, and document everything about it. The only thing you can't do is make it yourself and give it away or sell it. That gives legal protection against patent violations from the largest offenders, the ones with money. You are confusing this with licensing terms.
Why would they risk being sued? If use of a product is considered risky by the inventor, they could offer it to the public with no warranty. This is already how most freeware is distributed, they explicitly refuse to take responsibility if the program formats your hard drive.
That won't actually work you know. No one is going to bother to sue when
Advanced Windows File Renamer 2000 deletes all their furry porn, but in general, you cannot just disavow responsibility like that. You can't stick a "may contain poison" sticker on bags of candy and hand them out to tricker-treaters, then not get punished for serial murder when a bunch of people die.
Placing restrictions on redistribution of software is creating artificial scarcity. Once software is created, there is no significant cost to reproducing it.
Irrelevant. The cost of creating software is still very high and having legal protection to limit reproduction means that the cost can be spread across a wider base, lowering prices overall. It doesn't matter that a few freeloaders don't want to pay pirate it, but there must be some penalty or the economics of making software doesn't work. And strangely enough, a certain fat and lazy autist who has never had a real job in his life, instead sucking off the MIT teat, doesn't realize that most people have to work in order to eat and don't just get things handed to them on a silver platter.
Reverse-engineering is already illegal. Anyone who's willing to decompile software isn't going to be stopped by a patent.
The reason why more companies don't just decompile their competitors' product is exactly because it violates copyright. There is nothing illegal about reverse engineering, unless it violates the licensing agreement, and that is a tort, not a crime.